Thursday, August 5, 2010

The week I almost completely quit the internet

I'm not kidding. I hit that breaking point a few weeks back. I was sitting on my couch at about 10:30 at night. It was one of those nights. I'm in the off season now of course with my job at SXSW, but that particular day I had a lot to deal with, and seemed to be on calls all day. While on those calls, I'd get hit with people via Gchat and AIM, and while listening to folks talk, I'd inevitably check my Facebook and Twitter.

Then that night, as I said after a fairly long day, my wife went to yoga (her smart, me dumb) and I put the kids to bed and sat on the couch. I opened my laptop and turned it on, pretty much at the same time I turned on the TV. I don't remember what I was watching, but as that big 42 inch screen glowed, my lil laptop came to life, and I checked my texts on my phone.

I signed into my email on my laptop - both work and personal - looked up at the TV, probably a baseball game, I don't know, that's usually what I watch when the three girls I live with are not around, and I looked back down at my computer and began deleting spam.

Then, since I have no alerts set on my phone, as I have had this number for maybe 10 years now and every rap affiliated person in Texas and beyond has the number and it never stops, I looked to see if I had any texts. I did.

Then I checked my Facebook in another tab, while both of my emails were open, and then I signed into Twitter on my phone.

Then I looked up at the ceiling and asked God to please help me. For I had truly entered the Matrix.

I don't hate Facebook, and I certainly don't hate Twitter. In fact I have a lot of fun with both of them and I really love what Twitter does for me business/promotions wise. I love the fact that I have reconnected with so many good friends on Facebook, and I can't lie, I love reading my good friends musings. It's a little weird to know so much about each other, but I can't front, I'm the type of person that likes to keep close with everyone I know. And Facebook allows me to do that.

But Goldurnit that shit was really starting to get me!

There is literally no reason that anyone who is not an air traffic controller, or a security guard at a large building should ever have three screens or more glowing in their face. None.

I decided that I had to take a real look at my life. At first, I can't lie, I blamed Facebook and Twitter, as if they were starting to take control of my mind. I was a few days away from heading up to Erie, PA to visit my mother, and from there hitting up New York, Chicago and Toronto for fun, and work meetings, so I decided that my 38 year old ass was gonna go old school on 'em. I wasn't going to Tweet or check Facebook while on the road, and I pretty much avoided my emails except for the main one I use for work.

Then my phone broke. So I borrowed an old ass one, and hit the road. I was planning on not texting anyway, but with the old ass phone I had it wasn't really even an option. So as if it was 1986, I contacted everyone via phone call - albeit from a cell phone that weighed way less than they did in 1986 - and did things the way I used to do them before the internet made everything so "easy."

It actually worked out really well. I thought to myself towards the end of my trip "Man, wouldn't it be so liberating if I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts?" And came quite close to doing so. But I thought about it and realized that it wasn't the fault of these sites, it was my obsessive compulsive psychotic unfocused delirium.

And I have to fix that. Mark Zuckerberg sure ain't gonna fix it, I have to fix it.

So I says to myself, "Self, you got to figure this out. You have a blog that people used to read and enjoy, but now that you can hit possibly even more people with a 140 character tweet with the greatest of ease, you have fallen off a bit and YOU GOTSA pick yourself back up."

So I am doing that, and I want you, my readers, my friends to help me.

First of all, if I ever go a week without posting something here, in fact if I ever go three days without posting here, I want you to yell at me. If you have my number, call, if not, send me an email and tell me to get on the stick. Email addy is of course at the top of this page off to the right.

Second of all, I would like SOME of you to contribute. Can you write? Do you love music, art, culture and politics? Well if you want to cover any of that, hit me up at the email addy above and lets get it poppin'. I am very much not against having contributed pieces going up on AustinSurreal, and would like to thank Robert Gabriel for being so on point lately and sending me some shit. I want you to do that as well.

I can't cover everything. I am a 38 year old man with a full time job, a wife, two kids, a life, and everything else that comes with those things (even at times a nervous breakdown). I admit that I need help. While I work hard to "fix" myself, and find a happy medium with all this internet shit, I'd love it if you would hit me up and send me cool, original stuff that you would like me to post.

This does not mean that I want to become like most of the hip-hop blogs in the blogosphere - I don't want to aggregate content at all, if it's up someplace else, let it stay there. But if you want to preview a show, review a show, send me some pics from a show, review a record made in Texas, rant about medical marijuana and why it should be legal in Texas, by all means hit me up.

And I am going to work harder at this blog shit too. I need to get AustinSurreal up to HoustonSoReal proportions (but to be fair during HoustonSoReal I didn't have a real job so I could do anything I wanted) and I need to do it now. So starting today, I am going to start treating AustinSurreal properly and I am also going to at times post Tweet style "status updates" or whatever.

2 comments:

glad to see you back on the bloggin. I feel you tho....I dont do the face or the tweetn & havent been on myspace in weeks either. but there is nothing better than going on vacation & not having to deal with the phone, email, text, etc. Did that for a full week in Jamaica recently & I can dig it. stay up & keep it jammin